Advice wanted for a potential Pro tools user

[Philleken]

Hello,

I am new here but was a member in the old DUC forum when I was running a digi 001 on a PC.
But now I want to take the plunge into the Mac world (haven't bought one yet) and need some advice.

I'm planning on buying one of the iMac systems and want to know what I can expect in therms of track count and number of plugins whit a certain processor.Maybe some iMac users can chime in here.

Do I need an external firewire drive for audio?

The guy a my local musicstore adviced against the Mbox because of latency issues an recommends the Mbox pro.What are your opinions about that?

Thanks, Phil.

[BradLyons]

Moving from the Windows environment to a Mac environment was the best thing I ever did for my own studio and production needs. I had a live system and a studio system, both HD3 Accel's. While on this specialized Windows box it ran fine, there were issues from time to time that I traced back to being Windows. Ever since going Mac-based for both rigs, PROBLEMS SOLVED! I've designed and sold many systems to my own clients based on the iMac, they are wonderful computers for professional audio and video these days---and have been for a few years. The original iMac's, not so much---but these Intel machines are insanely powerful! As to a firewire hard-drive YES, you need one---and I will tell you Glyph because they do just work. Drives are designed for storing and saving data, but audio is so big that you need some serious thruput to make sure it's happy.

[the blast]

I just bought an iMac 24in refurbished from Apple's website. Love it so far. Had a few issues getting it up & running but simply trashing the preferences by running the utility from Avid's site & running the "repair permissions" on the system drive has always set it straight.

As for the external FW drive, I did a bunch of research & got a recommendation from a great friend who is a professional engineer & I ended up getting a 500GB Avator PDX-800 7200 FW drive. It's tiny, easily portable, bus powered, has 1 FW400, 2 FW800, 1 USB2.0 & a power input if it's needed. It also comes with every cable you could need, a little carrying pouch & a 3 year warranty. With 2 day shipping it cost me just under $200.

I've heard some negatives in the past year or so about some of the Lacie stuff. I think the Glyph drives are good a but I have no experience with them. The OWC drives are supposed to be great for the price as well.

Hope that helps,
-john

[Philleken]

Hello, thanks for the advice.

Phil.

[nst7]

Any of the Imacs are great. If you think you'll have complex sessions with a lot of tracks, you should go for the 27" Imac with the upgrade to the quad core I7. It's worth the extra $200 vs. the quad I5.

[BradLyons]

Originally Posted by nst7

Any of the Imacs are great. If you think you'll have complex sessions with a lot of tracks, you should go for the 27" Imac with the upgrade to the quad core I7. It's worth the extra $200 vs. the quad I5.

I agree..... I really wish Apple would just make this a STOCK configuration instead of special order, sigh.